I dont think the FAA are allowed to interfere with the craft itself unless it is an obvious danger to the crew and everyone around it or if there is a serious accident with it.

Sounds like the shuttle may have problems on both counts, perhaps the FAA can ground it permanently so something else can take its place.

In the UK the Airforce are not immune to prosecution should one of their aircraft fall on someone. Whats the situation in the US? Could NASA be stopped from flying the shuttle because it is a danger to the public?

_________________A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Whats the situation in the US? Could NASA be stopped from flying the shuttle because it is a danger to the public?

I'm not a shuttle fan, but do you remember the launches of Galileo and Cassini, how the hard-core environuts bitched and moaned and protested because there was an RTG on board, and was going to kill us all? I'd hate to think that they could actually go to court and get an injunction against NASA to stop them from launching a deep space probe.

But as to your question, I really don't know but I'd say that's probably why they launch over the ocean. And remember Columbia disintegrated over populated areas, but I don't remember hearing about any of the pieces hurting anyone.

On another note, some people have said that NASA is anti-safety. Not to defend them, but my father did some experiments in some of their facilities during the 80's, and he says he spent more time on safety procedures than he did on actual engineering. (He has a really funny story about climbing around inside the big vacuum chamber at Plumbbrooke for 3 hours trying to make sure there were no unconscious people laying around in there before they evacuated the air.) That's not a good thing either, but the point is that their problems don't stem from being anti-safety, but more from bureaucratic inefficiency.

I dont think NASA is anti-safety, but the shuttle does seem to be overly dangerous, having to go to the effort of producing repair kits indicates that the improvements they have made are not enough and they are expecting further failures.

_________________A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

It seems like there's a fight going on within the US government about how much legislation to impose on the private space industry, lets hope the eventual rule book isn't to thick.

I might point out that once a permanent, self-sufficient, off-world colony is established, the "rule book" of any nation (or even the UN) can be wholeheartedly ignored. "You won't let us land because you don't like _____? Okay, then we won't bother to export your goods, and thus kill a multi-million dollar industry......"

And what would happen if the FCC and America Online got into a fight, and AOL decided to shut down its services in America and charge exorbitant fees for other companies to use whatever servers it owns? Better still, what if one or two other ISPs decided to do the same? 20 years ago, that would have meant nothing. Now........ Let's just say it's a slightly different story -- as in the US economy grinds to a halt in about 5 minutes flat.

Is it true? Please say it is! AOL is going to shut down its services? A bit of a rediculous example, but I do think that only the suckers and the technologically impaired will be affected. I'm not sure how proliffic AOL is in the US, but in Canada its service is laughable, and its CD's are best used as coasters or building furnature with.

Okay, so some billionaire owner of an internet backbone provider invests his life savings in a space-development company, and gets tied down by the FAA. Tempers get heated, and he decides to pull the plug on all his clients in America. Hmm, how did he get into his position if he's so unreliable and prone to bad service? I doubt that his board or investors would leave him in control for long enough to get dressed in the morning, not to mention a spontaious re-allocation of backbone provider responsibilities among competitors.
This playboy may have succeeded in pissing off a few million people, but he's completely lost his money wagon. I don't think anyone that tempermental and short-sighted would ever successfully climb to such an influential position.

By the way, I don't think that any simple ISP could sucessfully do anything like that. It would be corporate suicide with *very* minimal effects. The IT boys will have lots of overtime, but as soon as any corporation hears that their ISP is getting in a nasty tangle with government, you can bet there'll be a number of alternative providers lined up.

Argh. This got completely obfuscated. The point is that the internet developed from a toy of the elite geeks to the nervous system of an entire economy over the course of about a decade.

Okay,... So how does this relate to the rest of the topic? In case you didn't know, after the internet developed from a toy of the [ universities and millitary ] into a neural hub of the economy, the government became actively involved in regulating the internet. Yes, it can only *really* regualte the activity within its own borders, but regualte away it does. Are you saying that when space travel develops there will be nobody to regulate it? I don't see how your example shows anything.

Oh, well, I didn't help any: my point was that space colonization just might take off like the Internet did, assuming that there's a good enough market for it.

moore's law ==> probably doesn't apply to space. that's most of the reason why the internet grew so fast- huge leaps in computing power. space is more analagous to the fourth (?) industrial revolution (assuming it happens). it'll take 20-30 years to get going, but then there'll be no stopping it. like the first 3 industrial revs. now i need to go through them to make sure i've got my stuff right (this is for the us):

and 4th industrial rev: probably will start within 20 years (with first space-based factory). kciks off with asteroid mining. growth potentially indefinite due to infinite resources of space. orbital manufacturing.

EDIT: potential parallel industrial revolution along with space: biological manufacturing (what with advances in protein folding, genetic engineering, cloning, etc... cool but not my main interest, or this board's)

Back in 1979, THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by G. Harry Stine described the potential of utilizing space as a manufacturing facility.

The ascription, "third industrial revolution" cites the steam engine as spawning the first revolution, the computer the second revolution, and man's first steps in space the beginning of the third industrial revolution

The ascription, "third industrial revolution" cites the steam engine as spawning the first revolution, the computer the second revolution, and man's first steps in space the beginning of the third industrial revolution

lol, i don't know. my history textbook considers the first industrial revolution to be the creation of the factory system for manufacturing textiles in the north east and the second to be the switch to heavy industry- steel, railroads, oil, etc. i don't know if it considers there to be a third one, but i'd argue that the computer caused one back in the 50s and 60s, which has now finished in switching our economy almost completely away from heavy manufacturing to more refined technical manufacturing. hence making space the fourth industrial revolution.

C'mon people, give up the semantics. TerraMrs was just trying to make a point here. Which, by the way, I agree with.

Of course, if a hundredth of the Earth's population actually works towards space colonization (which ain't gonna happen), we'd have Mars under terraforming and inhabited by about 100,000 people inside of three decades.